this is the abominable mystery of the World.

"it is a profound responsibility to be a flower"

dear little voice,

Love was born two hundred million years ago, when the nautilus shells still sung on silver beaches with one groove, when the Moon was closer- so close you could hear Her silver warble in the stillness- when the Earth was cold, so cold she only spoke in a terrestrial hum of grey and green.

there were animals and plants, of course, before there was Love. but they were cold-blooded: they slinked with their bellies to the Earth and made no contact with one another. reproduction was a precarious game of chance. they flung their pollen to the wind, for an instant cutting brief yellow light into the trees against the staggering improbability that it may reach another member of their species. there were no messengers. they were alone.

Love rang no bells when she arrived. one day she simply awoke the morning with a rhythm. she carpeted the world in a babbling trails: in lyrics, garlands, and spells; in great, bell-like blushing; in a rumble of colour and song. in an oath. in prayer.

there were many Loves, and we have named them now (something human beings very much like to do): daisies are simple Loves. they have a single layer of petals, and the memory of childhood games. they are different to the golden everlasting, who is born dead, whose dryness aspires to Eternity, whose name in Greek means: sun of gold. violets do not shout their perfume, they capture their own secrets in modest curtsy, demanding curiosity, evading it with a blush. night jessamine has the smell of the Moon: she is a Silent, hot whistle in gardens where lights are off and windows are shut. the full body of a rose arches to meet you in her own untidy wildness. earth-things below fly from her thunder.

Love in Big Sur, California.

because of the way she reproduces, Love grew faster than the more ancient animals and plants. this is because Love had something that they did not: Beauty.

it was a Beauty that sung to the Earth. Love was sunlight and sugar finding one another in the dark, and in this alchemic dance, there grew fruit. it was the Beauty of the flowers, little voice, that drew in the luminous wet swarms of bumblebees and crowns of butterflies in astonishment and wonder toward the thunder blossoms erupting over their heads. and so, little voice, Love exchanged Beauty for a little ride: the beetles and insects, enraptured, ravished her sweetness, and hummed and buzzed her seeds all about the Earth with their new strength. they fluttered them toward the sounds of other petalled seeds tolling in the soil below, where the seedlings found mates with whom to flare from the soil in yet more dizzying Love, Love, Love. the animals then ravished the sugars in the fruit that grew, alchemising them into the proteins and energy needed for themselves to create more soft-bodies, pulses of warm blood, and footfall. this, little voice, is how Life was born.

Fee Schlapper, Easter Lamb (1955)

one day the Earth decided, for a moment- perhaps out of boredom, or perhaps ouy of curiosity- to roll over and be Beautiful. this Beauty created Love: perhaps the most unnecessary, the most impractical, the most typically useless, the most absurd, the most vital, the most prolific, the most life-giving invention in the history of the World.

in his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called this the abominable mystery of the world: he could not comprehend how flowers could erupt in such an immediate dance, cloud the Earth so rapidly, and birth a World so suddenly- and not simply any earth, but a New Earth.

this was A New Earth governed by an alchemic dance of reciprocity, of which was due in no small part to something apparently utterly unnecessary: one singular, brief, fleeting gesture. the ultimate force of regeneration proved to be: Beauty as a gesture of Love.

there is no need for flowers to be appear the way they does, and yet this is precisely how they grows so immediately, so unapologetically, and so unflinchingly.

and so the Earth came to hold Love in its mouth like snow: gently, gently.

“Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?”
- Andrew Sean Greer, The Story of a Marriage

little voice, if Love is the desire to Give Life, then the giving of Life comes in this tenuous exchange of Beauty: through the complete necessity of the unnecessity of kindness, it seems, we can create an ecosystem of Love.

it is, little voice, after all: a “profound responsibility / to be a flower”.

a still from The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

a person is a blooming thing. this obvious truth has, for a long time, gone unnoticed.

there is a Greek word: xenia, to explain this blossoming.

Ovid had a story about this word.

two immortal beings drifted down to the Earth to heal a strange and sore world. although they were Forever Beings, and so were made of light- of smatterings of stars, snarls of honeysuckle and tangled shells- they put on hats and trousers and disguised themselves as travelling strangers. they knocked on every Known Door in the Known Universe, seeking help and guidance. nobody opened their door except to bolt it; the people on the Earth hushed from behind the darkness, smacked their teeth, and scuttled off to their More Important Work.

one day, these Forever Beings knocked at the door of an elderly couple- Baucis and Philemon- who opened their door in kindness. they saw that the strangers could not smile; that their clothes were soiled. they had nothing themselves, but they washed the strangers’ feet, laced their hair in wildflowers, brought to them daisies and pale hepatica from the garden on only the softest pillows, taught to them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen, of great warm eggs, buttered bread, fistfuls of apricots- removing the stones with a spoon- spoke to them in fables and parables, sung to them songs and prayers and did not ask their names, why their feet were dirty, or where they had walked from.

they kept their kindness like an oath.

they rejoiced as the travelling strangers began to love the world and its green spaces; its twigs, and its leaves, and then its silent blossomings, and then its gentle nights too- and when the strangers revealed that they were Gods in disguise, they rewarded Baucis and Philemon and their silent oath. and so, little voice, at the hour of their deaths, the Gods transformed the kind couple into trees for all of eternity: a linden and an oak.

Baucis and Philemon, Rachel Hamilton

because of their tenderness in this Life, the couple would now be huge and gracious and intertwined forever. they would belong to the very Earth they had sown their love into, and they would be held by it, and- in their own endings- what they had loved, they came to resemble. and what they resembled came to hold them now and forever.

xenia. in ancient Greek: ritual friendship.

it is a story. and, like all stories, it contains a command: you must open your door to whomever passes, because anyone, no matter how far from home, may just be a God.

you must spread flowers and it must be utterly, fantastically unnecessary.

you must be the abominable mystery in an otherwise cold and catastrophic world.

Baucis and Philemon’s is the same song that flowers sewed into the Earth. it goes like this: “what you want is for someone to hold you: gently, gently. what you want is someone to hold you: hold you with Love. to say to you, without fuss: you are worthy of your Life”.

“It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.”

— Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise

Waves of handprints dating between 7,300 BC & 700 AD, Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands), Santa Cruz, Argentina, Pablo A. Gimenez.

the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman writes of human beings in A Moth To A Flame:

“Something strange happens when people are in a small boat, something  that rarely happens with people in a car or an elevator, in a train or  even a boat large enough to say that you are on it instead of in it.  What they experience is the sense of solitude. There are only a few thin  boards keeping them from being totally  engulfed by the surrounding deep  sea. They are lonely, but it’s not an isolated loneliness, because they  feel lonesome together, together with others in the boat. This is why a  temporary bond forms between people in a small boat. They only have  each other, the deep sea is frightening, and small boats are very  fragile. Therefore, each one of them becomes the other’s lifebuoy. If  you’re not afraid, then neither am I, so we shouldn’t scare each other,  and we ought to be nice to each other as long as the water surrounds  us.”
- Stig Dagerman, A Moth to a Flame (Burnt Child), tr. Benjamin Mier-Cruz

little voice, i do not know much. but i do know that being on a little boat is very much like being on a Little Earth. this is a very fragile place. i do not know how it works. i do not know how we fit, or why, or whether we do at all. it can be very cold and very crowded. and this can be a very baffling and very terrifying thing.

i do know, however, that there are sights too beautiful to remain buried: that i have seen an elbow offered at a crosswalk to a stranger. that i have seen strangers scramble to collect the spill of loose lemons from another’s basket. that i have seen a knee to the pavement to double knot a child’s loose lace. that i have realised the grandeur of the words bless you upon a sneeze.

that i have seen such abominable mystery.

go ahead. you first. here, take this. here, have my seat. i’ll go first. let me get that for you. i like your hat. it’s not a problem at all. bless you. bless you. bless you.

i have been reminded. i have been reminded. i have been reminded: that, for small creatures like us, the cold and small boat is bearable only through Love.

Franz Wright, Night Walk.

what if i told you, little voice, that each time you are tender with someone, mosses make an earth of your bones? what if i told you, little voice, that each time you are kind, songbirds nestle in homes of your hair? that ivy clambers up the lines of your body, and flowers flourish beneath your most tender words? that the paths of your body are rooting themselves; that you and the Earth are now huge and gracious and intertwined forever?

“What if we shift the question from ‘who do I want to be?’ to the question, ‘what kind of life do I want to live with others?’? It seems to me that then many of the questions you pose about happiness, but perhaps also about ‘the good life’ – very ancient yet urgent philosophical questions – take shape in a new way. If the I who wants this name or seeks to live a certain kind of life is bound up with a ‘you’ and a ‘they’ then we are already involved in a social struggle when we ask how best any of us are to live.”
- Judith Butler, in an interview.

this is the Life-Giving; the ecosystem of Love. through it, every part of you will be loved in return by the ones you feed. through them all, you will live many lives. of each, you must be proud.

Phillip Lakrin, An Arundel Tomb

Life circles around flowers; it is drawn in like a spell.

one marigold in the middle of winter will draw in sparrows, deer, mice, possums, beetles, lichen, wild children and lovers.

animals and people will travel for miles simply to be close to it. songbirds will flock to its pollen. the sun and rain will transmute magic, witnessing its importance, simply to keep it alive. emerging from the soil, bowing their necks to the earth, stretching their bodies to the sky, they offer reciprocity in their amazing kindness. the very Earth inhales with their breath.

you are the abominable mystery of the World. we are each creating a garden in sights too beautiful to remain beneath the Earth.

let your fingers make flowers of all things.

"Down the road there is an old man who sits in a chair under the  porch of his front door to enjoy the sun. He is very old. In fact, he is  dying. And because I know this, every time I pass him I pass the time of day with him. I tell him he is getting brown in the sun. Or he asks  me about the price of the vegetables in my shopping bag – once he lived  in the country – and I answer him at length and with great warmth. Why  do I do this? It is a natural reaction. Soon he will die [and] I want  him between now and then, and perhaps even at the moment of dying, to  have good thoughts, not of me personally, but of the living, of the  world he leaves. I want to give him reason for thinking the best possible thoughts."

- John Berger, A Painter of Our Time

as Jack Kerouac said: “practice kindness all day to everybody, and you will realise you’re already in Heaven now.”

in xenia,

ars poetica.

flowers growing. unknown photographer.